Episode 5: The Sophists - A Fifth Century Enlightenment Movement? (Part 1)

Summary

This episode asks questions that the Sophists raised in fifth-century Athens and never fully resolved. When a school of thought is almost entirely known through the writings of its most powerful critic, how much of what we think we know is actually inherited bias? And why has that bias proven so durable? The Sophists were the most sought-after teachers in the ancient world’s most dynamic democracy. They advised statesmen, theorised language and law, and argued that human excellence could be taught to anyone willing to learn. That last claim is worth pausing on. In a society where virtue was assumed to be inherited through noble blood, what did it mean to say that any citizen — regardless of birth — could be educated into excellence? What threat did that pose to the people who had most to lose from it? And if the answer to that question partly explains the Sophists’ reputation, what does it tell us about whose version of intellectual history we have been handed? These are not academic exercises. Questions about who controls the narrative of a movement, whether capability without wisdom constitutes genuine progress, and whether justice is convention or nature surface in political and institutional debates to this day. The Sophists did not resolve them. Neither, as this episode argues, did Plato.

Overview

In Part 1 of this two-part episode, we examine one of the most misunderstood intellectual movements in Western history. The word sophistry is still in common use today — and it is almost always an insult. Yet the people this label was originally attached to were central figures in Athenian intellectual life: advisors to statesmen, authors of constitutions, and theorists of language, law, and knowledge. To understand what they actually argued requires first understanding what happened to their reputation and who was responsible for it. Drawing on W.K.C. Guthrie’s landmark 1969 work A History of Greek Philosophy, Joshua Billings’ framing of the “Fifth-Century Enlightenment,” Rachel Barney’s close analysis of Sophistic method and technē theory, and Mauro Bonazzi’s reassessment in The Sophists, this episode works to recover the historical Sophists from the negative portrayal that has obscured them for over two thousand years.

The episode then turns to what the Sophists actually claimed.  At its center is Protagoras’s account of how human beings raised themselves from primitive helplessness through the accumulation of technē, systematic and teachable skill. But the episode closes on a tension the Sophists themselves could not resolve: whether technical capability alone is sufficient for civilization to hold, or whether something else — political virtue, civic wisdom, a shared sense of justice — must accompany it. That unresolved tension is what Plato inherits. And it is what Part 2 is about.

For Further Reading

Primary Scholarly Sources

Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume 3: The Fifth-Century Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1969.

The scholarly backbone of this episode. Guthrie’s decision to title the volume “The Fifth-Century Enlightenment” was itself an argument — a direct rebuttal to Edward Zeller, who had used the same comparison as an attack. His treatment of the nomos-physis distinction and the democratic implications of Protagoras’s myth remain the essential starting point.¹

Bonazzi, Mauro. The Sophists. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

A concise reassessment that takes the Sophists seriously as thinkers in their own right rather than as a foil for Plato. Particularly valuable for Bonazzi’s challenge to the standard relativist reading of the “man is the measure” fragment, and his insistence that the hostile filter of Plato and Aristotle has distorted our picture of what the Sophists actually argued.²

Barney, Rachel. “Sophistry.” In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, ed. Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin. Blackwell, 2006.

The episode’s primary analytical source for technē theory. Barney’s reading of technē as a social practice “marked by rationality” — teachable, systematisable, and explicable — gives the episode’s central argument its philosophical precision.

Billings, Joshua. “Sophists in the Fifth-Century Enlightenment.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists, ed. Joshua Billings and Christopher Moore. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Situates the Sophistic movement within the full breadth of fifth-century intellectual culture — tragedy, medicine, historiography — rather than philosophy alone. Billings’s identification of the internal Sophistic debate between Hippias and Protagoras on the limits of technē is the episode’s most surprising scholarly insight.³

Further Context

Plato. Protagoras. (Multiple translations available.)

The primary source for the Prometheus myth as the Sophists’ fullest account of progress through technē. Readers should bear in mind this is Plato’s reconstruction — the tension between what he allows Protagoras to say and what Socrates dismantles is a live scholarly debate, and the starting point for Part 2.

Aristophanes. The Clouds. (Multiple translations available.)

Staged in 423 BC while Protagoras was still teaching. Worth reading alongside the scholarly sources as a reminder that the Sophists’ reputation problem began not with Plato but with popular Athenian culture — and that Plato’s attack was building on ground already prepared.

Footnotes

¹ The American Historical Review described Volume 3 as “the most balanced and perceptive treatment of fifth-century thought that has yet been written.” The Times Literary Supplement added: “for those who wish their guide above all to be sound, Professor Guthrie is incontestably their man.”

² Bonazzi’s stated aim is to challenge the view of the Sophists as “mere charlatans and poor teachers” and to recover them as “protagonists and agents of fundamental change in the history of ancient philosophy.” (The Sophists, Cambridge University Press, 2020, publisher’s description.)

³ Bryn Mawr Classical Review described The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists as “among those rare edited volumes where the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.”

Questions to Consider Based on This Episode

• The Sophists proposed the first coherent theory of human progress as cumulative and open-ended: each generation inherits what the last learned, refines it, and passes it forward. If this assumption quietly underlies how modern societies justify education, expertise, and technological development, why is the word we derived from their name still an insult — and what does that tell us about whose version of intellectual history we have inherited?

• The Sophists argued that aretē — human excellence — could be taught to any citizen regardless of birth. In a society where virtue was assumed to be inherited through noble blood, this was a direct challenge to aristocratic authority. What institutions or hierarchies today still rest on the assumption that certain kinds of excellence are innate rather than teachable?

• The Prometheus myth in Plato’s Protagoras — whether it faithfully represents him or not — contains a striking internal tension: technē drives civilisation forward, yet without Zeus’s gift of justice and mutual respect distributed equally to all citizens, technical capability alone destroys communities. If this is Protagoras’s argument, is he undermining his own theory of progress?

• The nomos-physis distinction — whether justice is human convention or natural fact — was the wound the Sophists opened and could not close. If justice is merely convention, any society can revise it — but by the same logic, any powerful actor can dismiss it entirely. Is there a foundation for justice that exists independently of human agreement — and if so, where does it come from? That is the question Plato inherits.

Connecting the Dots

Episodes 1 through 4 established the historiographical landscape: what progress means as a concept, how scholars have categorised it, and why its history is more contested than it first appears. Episode 5 marks a shift in method — rather than surveying multiple frameworks, the series zooms in on a single movement to examine one fully developed theory of progress in detail.

In doing so, it reopens one of the series’ foundational questions, introduced in Episode 3 through the Bury-Edelstein controversy. Bury’s 1920 thesis held that progress is essentially a modern idea, born in the 17th century and crystallised in the Enlightenment. Edelstein’s counter-argument was that the Sophists had already developed genuine progress consciousness centuries earlier. The Sophists’ account of cumulative human advancement through technē doesn’t settle that debate — but it sharpens it considerably. If Protagoras’s theory of civilisational self-improvement is coherent on its own terms, what exactly did the Enlightenment add? Was it the origin of the idea, or its reinvention?

That question carries directly into Part 2, where Plato’s rejection of the Sophistic framework introduces the horizontal versus vertical opposition that will organise the rest of the ancient episodes.

Connection to Notions of Progress

Episode 5 is an examination of a single theory of progress — the Sophists’ account of cumulative human advancement through technē. By recovering what these thinkers actually argued, rather than accepting the negative image their opponents constructed, this episode models the curatorial approach the series will take throughout: surface the debate, follow the scholars, and let the evidence complicate the inherited verdict. Part 2 turns to Plato’s response.